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“Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” Reviewed: The Met Rescues a Master | The New Yorker

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Many have called him boring, a peddler of simpleminded beauty. At the Met, a blockbuster exhibition restores his standing.

Save this story Save this story It’s rare that history offers up a simple diagnosis of cultural decline, but we happen to know the exact moment when all of European art headed for ruin. According to the critic John Ruskin, the disaster was called Raphael. The Renaissance master, whose name is only ever sighed in the same breath as Leonardo and Michelangelo, supposedly traded truth for beauty, and ended up destroying both. His work was dull and vapid, a “tasteless poison,” Ruskin said. Just think of all those vacant Madonnas, structurally perfect compositions, and obedient daydreams of antiquit

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